A man injured in the fire is brought to hospital in Nairobi. Photograph: Khalil Senosi/AP
At least 61 bodies have been recovered after petrol that spilled into an open sewer caught fire and sent a wave of flame through a densely populated slum in Nairobi, police said.
Kenyan media put the toll higher, saying more than 100 people had been burned to death and a similar number taken to hospital in one of the country's worst fire disasters.
Police said it was proving difficult to establish the exact casualty figure because some charred remains had been found in groups.
Residents said petrol spilled from a fuel depot owned by the KenyaPipeline Company and ran into a sewage dyke under the slum, which is known as Sinai. The petrol ignited, causing an inferno.
"We have confirmed 61 dead so far, but we are retrieving more," deputy police spokesman Charles Owino told Reuters.
Owino said the fire was ignited by a cigarette butt that was thrown on to the dyke, which opens into a small river.
Authorities said they had to deal with the fire before they could confirm the number of victims.
Television channels aired images of smouldering bodies as the fire raged in an area which police said was about half a hectare in size.
Children in school uniform ran in all directions, crying. Badly burnt slum dwellers staggered in a daze, skin peeling off their faces and arms.
"There is an informal school inside the slum. They have all been burnt," said Daniel Mutinda, a spokesman for the Kenyan Red Cross.
The Kenyan prime minister, Raila Odinga, visited the scene and promised help for the victims. "The government will do everything possible to ensure the injured will be treated and the families who have lost their loved ones will be compensated," he said.
The country's president, Mwai Kibaki, visited patients with severe burns at the country's largest public hospital.
Police said some of the residents of the slum were killed while trying to scoop up the fuel from the burst pipe and from the sewer.
"The scene is bad. There is a large number of people burnt to death," Owino said. "There are many bodies. We are yet to count them. Sometimes poverty can push you to do very dangerous things."
One of the residents of the Sinai slum said people rushed to fill their jerrycans with free petrol.
"I was going to the loo down by the river just after 4am when I saw the gold flowing from the pipe. I ran home and grabbed two jerrycans and went back to fill them up. As I finished and turned away there was a boom as the fuel ignited," said Sammy Njenga, a 21-year-old unemployed slum dweller.
"I could feel the flames on my back and dropped one can so I could run further. But it spread so fast I dropped the other as well," he said.
"I had been standing next to a mother of three who wasn't fast enough. She died."
Abandoned jerrycans half-filled with petrol littered the scene where dozens of fire trucks and ambulances tried to make their way through the large crowd that gathered.
Firefighters scrambled across the corrugated rooftops of burning shacks to spray foam on petrol that flowed down the slum's muddy alleyways. Others pulled off iron sheet rooftops to gain access into other parts of the slum.
Fire trucks sprayed more foam to quench the inferno, while ambulances ferried dozens of injured people to nearby hospitals.
In a similar accident in 2009, about 120 people died when people wanting free fuel crowded around a tanker that crashed near the Rift valley town of Molo, in western Kenya. A cigarette set off the blaze, which engulfed the crowd.
No comments:
Post a Comment